I will take a short break from blogging for the rest of the week for travel reasons. Check back soon.
Speaking of onslaught (see yesterday’s post): the spring issue of Ms. Magazine carried a powerful article by Caroline Heldman on self-objectification:
A steady diet of exploitative, sexually provocative depictions of women feeds a poisonous trend in women’s and girl’s perceptions of their bodies, one that has recently been recognized by social scientists as self-objectification—viewing one’s body as a sex object to be consumed by the male gaze. Like W.E.B. DuBois’ famous description of the experience of black Americans, self-objectification is a state of “double consciousness … a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
Read more here.
Dove Onslaught
Dove Onslaught(er)
The juxtaposition between poverty and growing wealth presents an unsavory dilemma for luxury goods makers jumping into India.
A child from a poor family models a $100 Fendi bib
Article here.
If you are horrified by the sexualization of young girls, do not, under any circumstance, visit Halloween costume sites.
You may stumble into something like this:
Or this:
(Actually virtually every costume in the Kids section is lamentable)
My first thought upon seeing this ad in the back of a French magazine: “You have to be kidding me!”
This is obviously a BEFORE-and-AFTER Photoshop photo, not an illustration of BEFORE-and-AFTER “I have used Vichy Normaderm“. Unless the cream erases your skin pores, that is.
Premise:
You have to give some credit to beauty companies. They have an unsurpassed talent at searching for – and finding – new areas to exploit.
The strategy goes like this:
1) Find one area of a woman’s body that has no dedicated beauty products/treatments
2) Make up a product/treatment that would “improve” said area
3) Through advertising and articles in women’s magazines, imply that the natural appearance of said area is unattractive/embarrassing and that you can only be pretty and acceptable if you buy the product described at point #2
After a while, sometimes with the aid of TV (with story lines dedicated to the topic) this idea permeates public consciousness, to such an extent that using the product (or treatment) becomes a necessity.
Some recent examples of products and treatments fitting the description:
- teeth whitening strips (“you need blinding-white teeth!”)
- pedicure (“your feet are simply gross without one”)
- Brazilian wax (“you don’t want to look like Chewbacca down there, do you?”)
- Botox (“wrinkles = unacceptable”)
and now, one area for which advertising is very tricky: skin tone.
L
Starting in the late 1970s, Fair & Lovely (parent company: Unilever, grandaddy of Dove “We’re for real beauty”) began promoting its line of skin bleaching creams in India. Other companies followed suit in Asian countries like China, Taiwan and Japan – even though women living in those countries already have a fair complexion. The advertising message: “white is beautiful.”
In India, the message in TV commercials and print ads is that you cannot find love or a proper job if your skin is too dark. If you use a skin bleaching cream, your face will become fairer in a matter of days, and you will be able to attract the man/woman of your dreams and get that amazing job.
In other Asian countries, where women already have a naturally fair skin, the message is slightly different. L’Oreal, Dior, and Nivea – amongst others – promote the sale of skin whitening creams with the message that exposure to the sun can be dangerous, causing wrinkles and skin impurities. A glowing, white skin is the symbol of youth and freshness.
Pure genius. Through the modification of ad messages, these cosmetics giants have been able to sell products to women of different racial origins and skin complexions.
Now, let’s come to America (North & South), Europe, and Australia. Most women there, just like in Asia, have naturally fair skin (that is, Caucasian women). I can imagine some ad men going, “What can we sell them?”
If the message is that in order to be beautiful you have to go against your nature, you can easily get to the answer: “tan is beautiful”!!!
So, starting at right about the same time, in the late 1970s, a tan body for Caucasian women has been the symbol of status (can afford time to vacation) and health (with paleness becoming synonymous with sickliness).
So, tanning beds became extremely popular in the 1980s, through the mid 1990s – until a link was found in between melanomas (skin cancer) and the use of tanning beds.
And now, the very same companies that to this day promote skin whitening creams in the Middle East and all over Asia – L’Oreal, Dior, Nivea – have an arsenal of self-bronzing and self-tanning creams for their American, European, and Australian markets.
These two ads, because of their opposite message, will positively make you flip:
Video #1 – L’Oreal Nutribronze
Yay for cunning marketing!
By Anup Shah, GlobalIssues.org :
http://www.globalissues.org/article/160/media-and-advertising
About three months ago, upon completing the first phase of research for my film, I held two slideshow presentations in front of an audience of friends, acquaintances, and a few people working in the TV/movie industry in Paris. Very much in the style of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”
At the heart of the presentation is the assertion that the obsession over the pursuit of the perfect female body is one of the integral parts of the capitalist system. If women were suddenly content over their appearance – accepting their body size, skin tone & color, wrinkles, graying hair, and the size and shape of their breasts, amongst other things – entire markets would crumble. Indeed, worldwide sales for cosmetic products, dieting products, and cosmetic surgery totaled almost 500 billion dollars in 2006. Thus the saturation of images on advertising and mass media, pushing forward images of idealized, surgically-enhanced beauty that are impossible to achieve.
Well, during my presentations, I would invariably get asked about the company Dove and its campaign for “Real Beauty.” Wasn’t that refreshingly positive? People would ask. It is a question that comes up every time I talk about my project. The short answer? Yes and no.
The people at Dove have actually exploited a void in the marketplace. By introducing so-called women with “real” bodies, they distinguished themselves from their competitors. After the introduction of their “Real Beauty” campaign, according to the New Yorker, sales of Dove products shot up 700% in the U.K.
Why Dove’s “Real Beauty” is the quintessential example of corporate hypocrisy:
#1 – Its parent company is Unilever, maker of Lynx and Fair & Lovely
If the “Real Beauty” campaign criticized the advertising and media industry with ads like this and especially this one, another Unilever brand managed to reduce women to mere sexual objects/slaves through ads for its other brand Lynx: “Jet Set” is the perfect example. Indeed, the entire mantra of Lynx ads is to be so outrageous and sexist, regarding the effects of the deodorants on women, that the ads are often banned, achieving cult-like status.
Unilever is also the maker, in India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, of skin whitening creams for women and men. The commercials, running on borderline racist themes, always feature unhappy, socially rejected women and men with a dark skin color, who are magically transformed into popular people after using the “Fair and Lovely,” skin-whitening cream. Seducing the objects of their affection and obtaining prestigious jobs. Examples here and here.
#2 – The people behind the ads are industry bigwigs, who are otherwise working as “Illusionists” on other campaigns
The ad company Ogilvy and Mather, Annie Leibovitz, and photo retouching wiz Pascal Dangin are behind the ads (Leibovitz and Dangin took care of the print campaign).
#3 – The print ads are Photoshopped
In a New Yorker profile of the world’s highest paid, most sough after photo retoucher Pascal Dangin from the May 12th 2008 issue, writer Lauren Collins pressed him about the Dove campaigns:
I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”